


The Climb and the Child

by Ainsinnes



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Astra Militarum | Imperial Guard (Warhammer 40.000), Chaos 40k, Combat, Daemons 40k, Greater Daemon, Grey Knights 40K, Horror, Khorne, Warhammer 40.000 - Freeform, dream - Freeform, warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29178864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ainsinnes/pseuds/Ainsinnes
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	1. The Dream

Under a broiling purple sky, leaden clouds burst with claws of green lightning. He climbed. He had always been climbing. There was nothing before these steps, only what lay at their summit. Carved out of the black volcanic rock, the steps gently spiralled ever further upwards into the malevolent gloom of his future. Always with him were the faces. Mute and morose, these silent companions would writhe listlessly. Melded with the surrounding rock, their blackened skin would stretch and tear to reveal a pitiful skeleton and musculature as they grasped out with rasping broken fingers. They could never reach, never touch and retracted back into their private misery as he passed them.

How long had passed since he began the climb? It was impossible to say. The stairs simply kept winding their way upwards into the coiling smoke above. The faces grew in number, whole wretched torsos had wrenched themselves from obsidian prisons. Their melancholy flailing in the rising wind looked like seaweed caught in the ocean's cruel swell. Always they reached out to him, beginning to caress his armour as he passed and longingly brush their broken fingers against his skin. They were to be ignored. There was only the climb.

The spiral steps tightened and the eldritch mist thinned, revealing a shaft of geometric basalt shorn of its bubbled lava skin. A bitter wind menacingly began to whistle as he rounded the last few steps. The faces melted away and he stood at the top alone.

He stepped out onto the flat summit. The ground beneath seemed to thrum a faint yet powerful tattoo; immense drums in the heart of the mountain. Its slick surface shone in the crackling lightning, but seemed also to glow of itself. A deep burgundy glow that pulsed in sync with the vibration.

Looking back from the distance, a stone vessel had appeared. It was rectangular in shape and simply carved, with perfectly smooth sides. It was carved from the mountain itself, but had it always been there? Something stirred within. He stepped forward, cautiously ready but totally unafraid. There was nothing to fear here. He peered over the rim of the vessel.

Inside, wrapped in crimson silk, was a child; a Terran child. Though no older than two it did not seem unduly distressed by the macabre surroundings. Instead it regarded him with an innocent curiosity. He regarded it right back.

The wind had begun to rise, and with it, flecks of rain drifted from the turbulent sky. The child met his gaze, calmly locking eyes. Those cold grey blue eyes. He felt a ripple of familiarity. The wind rose further, its whistle becoming a ferocious howl and the rain began to lash down, bouncing off the flat summit and drenching the child’s wispy brown hair.

He blinked. The child raised its hand, two fingers extended toward the sky, still blankly meeting his increasingly confused expression. The deluge intensified and the liquid itself seemed to thicken. Rivulets poured down his face and into his mouth. The taste was acrid and metallic, it seemed to burn his tongue and simultaneously freeze his skin; it was blood. The child was now indistinguishable from its silken covering. Only those piercing blue eyes cut through the scarlet. It rose from within its vessel, now filling with blood and pointed straight at him. The wind reached fever pitch. It roared in his ears. But the noise was not the wind. It was him. He was screaming in a bestial holler. Though bursting from his lungs, the voice was not his. It carried the rage of untold billions. It spoke of fury and violence unsurpassed by mortal men. He tried to shut his mouth, but couldn’t, the roar continued to pour from his very soul as the child opened its mouth to speak.

“My Lord? My Lord!”

Brother Captain Vectrix sat up abruptly. His right hand was covered in blood and motor oil. His vision settled on its source, a shattered servitor attendant. It wheezed as the augmetics vainly attempted to compensate for its crushed remaining organs, before slumping into a heap at the foot of his bed. It’s blank eyes were a discomfiting echo of that child.

“My Lord?” His personal serf enquired again, with mounting trepidation.

“Worry not Cassus.” The Grey Knight said with a rueful smile. His eyes however remained cold and the beads of sweat in his brow gave the serf no small cause for concern.

“There are still a few hours remaining my Lord. Would you like me to reset the closing rituals and verses, that you might return to your, er, rest?” Cassus offered, hoping the comfort of routine might ease his master’s clearly stormy mood.

Vectrix rose and towered over his serf. Reaching around him Vectrix grabbed his copy of the Liber Daemonica.

“No thank you Cassus, I will retire to the Librarium until dawn ablutions”

Pausing only to mutter a quick prayer to the Emperor at his personal shrine, Vectrix marched from his cell into the gloom of the cloister and towards Titan's great Librarium vaults. There were questions that demanded answers.


	2. Encounter, Awaken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Translations  
> ‘In nomine Imperator et spiritus hominis, semel oblatum. Ego mittam te.’  
> 'In the name of the Emperor and the Spirit, offered once. I cast you out.'
> 
> '...In nomine vota, sexagesimum sextum! Ego mittam te!’  
> '...Hear these offerings, spoken sixty six times! I cast you out!'

Red lights pulsed ominously in the cramped corridors, as five baroque silver giants marched in brisk single file to the Strike Cruiser’s teleportarium. Their plan was simple and the objective clear. Only one soul-jangling slingshot through the Warp stood between them and eradicating the foul blight of the Malefick from another Imperial world. As he walked at the rear of the column, Brother Vectrix privately held an ulterior desire for an expedient conclusion; he urgently needed to finish his discussion with Titius, before it was too late. Vectrix dispelled these thoughts as he mounted the teleporter platform next to his brothers. He quieted his mind against the chilling whispers, and nightmarish images, that awaited in his impending seconds of Warp exposure. Banks of generators clunkily whirred into life, arrays of monitors displayed reams of detailed binary code, and grids of coloured lights blinked in complex patterns. Vectrix felt his cells quivering, as oily static enveloped his armour. His very soul began to tingle, every nerve seared with eldritch voltage and the shimmering charge viscously started pooling over the golden contact-plates at the squad’s boots. When the intense atmosphere reached its fever pitch, the glacier of reality around the Grey Knights calved startlingly. They vanished in a blinding flash, leaving only the disturbing echo of an inhuman screech lingering in the chamber.

Strike-Squad Jehans re-materialised on the planet’s surface as courscating bolts of arcane energy. Their forms sizzled gently, as the atoms in their bodies jostled to displace the existing air. However even this dramatic entry only caused a slight pause in the ferocious brawl, unfurling around them. The Grey Knights had become embroiled in determined resistance, fanatically offered by the Chaos cultists defending the ritual. However those precious seconds were all Vectrix and his brothers needed, to decimate the cultists immediately surrounding them and establish a perimeter. Each brother silently enacted the Canticles of Shielding, in perfect unison, mentalally suppressing the corrupted enemy’s awareness of the squad. They needed breathing room to take stock of their unexpected situation; this massive assault had  _ not _ been listed on the briefing docket. Vectrix dourly surveyed the new suite of obstacles arrayed before them. The cultists had fortified the sweeping causeway, which led up to a great circular spoil heap; the archaeological remains of pre-Imperial settlement. The ghostly outline of an ancient temple could be sketched between the eroded remains of pillars, jutting out from the mound like jagged ribs. They too were desecrated with crudely daubed symbols, that seemed to squirm and wink as the area was saturated with malicious Warp-energy. In the centre the vile cultists had erected a gruemone altar of body parts and crude scraps of metal. The wind carried a chorus of ghostly cackling song and the crude palisade of stakes, impaled with the remains of sacrificial human chattel, was glowing ominously in a bruise of purple and red light. Worrisome signs that the dark ceremony was well underway. Any further delay was  _ unacceptable _ . Passing glances between the brothers and their Justicar confirmed this sober understanding.

The ragged forces of demented mutants, traitorous citizens, and mutinous PDF from the world’s Hive Cities, had doggedly held the loyal Arbites and Astra Militarum forces, attempting to breach the ritual site, at bay. The battered Imperial regiments had been stretched thin across a world desperately attempting to suppress pandemic insurrection, engineered by the despicable cultists to amplify the summoning ritual’s power. Meanwhile, behind hastily welded blast-doors, Imperial commanders had broadcast widespread calls for aid, whilst they still maintained control of the Astropathic Choir. However in their panic, they had apparently failed to include small details, like the exact scale of the conflict and the plans for their own forces. Having secretly intercepted the transmission, the Grey Knights were in no position to demand clarification from their ‘allies’ on the ground. The strike-squad had been dispatched with incredible haste and their flashy arrival had now doomed an unfortunately high number of brave guardsmen to ‘collateral damage’. 

Nevertheless Justicar Jehans was headstrong and aggressive. He was a formidable warrior and newly appointed to this command, an acknowledgement of his martial prowess rather than a history of measured experience. He pressed his squad forward immediately, charging straight towards the summit of the ritual mound and effortlessly glided through the routing Chaos filth, scattering before them. Although the intensity and scale of their defence was unexpected, trenches, grenades, and heavy weapons or not, these dishevelled Chaos lunatics were insects compared to the Grey Knight Astartes in Strike-Squad Jehans; the deadliest instruments of the Emperor’s wrath to ever grace the Imperium. Each brother chanted in unison as they ran, projecting the dancing aurora of their aegis outward into a dazzling corona of combined psychic power, that buffeted anything marked by Chaos to its filthy knees. Those damned souls, comprising this vile cult’s membership, could barely stand to face such pure manifestations of the Corpse Lord’s power. The scant few with enough sanity remaining to sporadically return fire, and not merely freeze, were systematically dispatched with exacting salvos of storm-bolter fire and clinical scything arcs from nemesis force-weapons. 

In the wake of Squad Jehans’ inexorable psychic bow-wave, the now cheering guardsmen had drifted into the corpse-strewn sandbag redoubts and improvised bunkers. Every man looked jovial in assured victory, but it was a hollow feeling and nobody was volunteering to approach their saviours. Not that the mortals, themselves preoccupied with idly bayoneting dead heretics ‘to be sure’, could keep pace with those transhuman warriors. The Grey Knights had already cleared one third of the long steep slope and the din of battle was now far enough from the guardsmen, that tabac sticks were lit and jestingly tossed at unready recipients. Hip flasks of contraband were furtively drawn from stash-pouches and survival gratefully toasted. 

The bemused officer corps, leading from the rear, hid their bewilderment from the soldiery behind typical pomp and bombast. Of course every officer had ‘always’ been aware of this impending miracle. General orders to reload, fix bayonets, and advance, were rapidly barked at the bruised vanguard and a column of exhausted troops began jogging up the causeway, to support their Astartes reinforcements. Details were peeled off and told to ‘secure’ the enemy dead. The same guardsmen had been attritionally slogging up and down this slope all day, bloodily ebbing and flowing towards the ritual site. Occasionally an advancing guardsman would stumble on an arm bearing his unit number, or a leg wearing a Munitorum stamped boot. This final push was a cynical gesture to the bodies of those loyal soldiers, paving the guardsmen’s trampling advance. These mythical Astartes had already obliterated their sacrifices, along with the impregnable defences, scant minutes after their dramatic arrival. The Knights themselves had not even acknowledged their human allies and pressed relentlessly up the causeway, to the spoil heap and its grisly palisade. 

Miniscule as it was, that wasteful delay in the Grey Knights’ advance had cost their mission dearly. It had allowed the chief cultists to fulfil  _ their _ dark ambitions and complete the esoteric bloody ceremony necessary to summon their foul Daemon Prince master. Although, after centuries of heretical promises and diabolical pacts, the ritual had not gone quite as planned for the cultists either. Instead of summoning a grateful master, ready to bestow them with lavish gifts and claim the world for its own nefarious ends, a far more nightmarish prospect began to materialise. An enormous Bloodthirster of Khorne had apparently wrested control of the Warp-rift from the other side. Brutishly trampling over the Daemon Prince at the rift’s event horizon, it forcibly clawed and ripped its way into this locus of real-space instead.

The behemoth was a towering solid mass of red muscle and a rancid forest of crusty bloodsoaked fur. The ground cracked around its cloven hooves and colossal hook-tipped wings unfurled from stringy protoplasmic skinsacks, scouring the whole causeway with blasts of abrasive dust. The Bloodthirster casually massacred its cultist hosts, surrounding the hellish gateway, with a single swing of its axe. Easily the size of Vectrix, the notched double-headed blade was inscribed with malevolent runes, thrumming with an insatiable sanguine thirst. The force behind the Greater Daemon’s blow easily lifted each squealing doll high into the air, collecting all eight, before shearing them into a monochromatic rainbow of viscera. As disgusting rain pattered over the ritual site, the Bloodthirster cast its evil gaze over the ruined landscape for the prize worthy of such a violent and risky birth into the Materium. Suddenly the Greater Daemon rushed headlong towards the advancing Grey Knights, seemingly fixated on them alone. Regardless the carnage of its onslaught remained utterly indiscriminate, leaving hundreds of the guardsmen and cultists now fighting on the slope of the ritual site, butchered in its wake. With barely a century’s worth of actual combat experience each, the callow strike-squad was now confronted with a dire situation far beyond any of their previous reckonings. Nevertheless they were the Grey Knights; superlative equals to any First Company of the other Chapters.

However, before even pausing to inform the awaiting Strike Cruiser of this dangerous mission update or issue orders to his fellow brothers, Justicar L’Roi Jehans immediately sprinted at the monstrous Greater Daemon, howling battle oaths to the Emperor. Though temporarily flummoxed by their leader’s tempestuous abandon, Vectrix and the rest of the squad moved to surround the beast and pour firepower onto it. Though the sting of psy-charged warheads was substantially more irritating than a regular heavy bolter, they barely convinced the Greater Daemon to slow its blindly murderous advance, long enough to fully acknowledge Justicar Jehans; its first real challenger. Squad Jehans started channeling their synchronized psychic might into overlapping barrages of resonant Canticles of Binding and hexagrammic energy wards. Anything to try and shackle the Bloodthirster’s unearthly lightning movements, buying their Justicar a slim chance of surviving his reckless charge. Jehans repaid his brothers’ efforts, sliding under the Daemon’s guard and pummelling its abdomen with psycannon rounds. Thick black blood spattered from its steaming wounds and the enraged Bloodthirster howled in maddening pain.

The squad’s psychic efforts, and a coordinated fusilade of astrally assisted storm-bolter fire, were starting to impose some restraint on the Greater Daemon’s movements. Justicar Jehans was able to recover his posture quickly and instantly strike at the creature’s rear with his nemesis force-sword. But a snaking barbed whip inexplicably snapped towards Jehans, skittering his blade aside and unbalancing the Justicar. He was forced to pirouette desperately away from the accompanying wild swing of the keening axe. The Bloodthirster was an incredibly powerful entity and Jehans had never fought a Greater Daemon up close before, let alone felt one’s foetid breath on his face. It ignored the bolter fire, pattering harmlessly into leathery shielding bat wings, and distilled its rage into single-minded fury upon the desperately embattled Justicar. With every jarring crack of his nemesis sword against the Bloodthirster’s axe, Jehan’s glowing wards dulled slightly. After the hundredth parry, several were beginning to flicker and crack under the mountainous tirade of blows. Worse still his supporting brother’s guns began to fall silent, one by one. Each brother bravely hefted his nemesis weapon, left with no other choice but to loyally charge in piecemeal and aid the weary Jehan. The rest vainly maintained the chant and dwindling barrage of firepower, to secure the fluctuating psychic barriers and shields. 

Vectrix’s forlorn brothers were immediately swatted clean across the battlefield. The ground buckled with their impact, bodies tumbled wildly and churned through the flagstones, before colliding with ruined pillars at bone shattering speed. On the HUD, superimposed inside Vectrix’s visor, life indicators blinked and flickered off; vox channels blared a requiem of static, before falling silent permanently. Eventually even the valiant Justicar L’Roi Jehans was struck down. Mercilessly exploiting a moment of exhausted hesitation, the Bloodthirster caught Jehans with its fiendish whip. It coiled around his gorget and the Justicar was flung off his feet, force-sword tumbling from his hand. The guffawing Daemon then wrenched its stricken quarry back, catching the doomed Grey Knight in one hand. Without even blinking, the abhorrent looming creature distended its vicious maw, exposing cruel razor teeth, and chomped his head off. A horrific geyser of arterial gore drenched the Justicar’s proud silvery armour, defiling his noble body into a gruesome effigy of Khorne’s brutal dominion. Roaring victory, it slammed another massive crushing hand into Jehans’ chest. Iron clawed fingers sunk deep into armour, then flesh, then bone. The Justicar’s lifeless body was maliciously torn asunder and part of him was flung at Vectrix, in playful mockery of Strike-Squad Jehans’ only survivor. 

It was a bloody comet of rent ceramite and tattered Astartes, certain to crush Vectrix. To deflect it, the Grey Knight was instead forced to endure the shame of slicing his former brother in half. However at that spiritual nadir, when the blade of Vectrix’s nemesis force-halberd begrudgingly cut into his brother’s armour, something awakened in him. The spark triggered a cascade of psychically charged neurons throughout his body that ignited an inferno of psychic potential. His eyes locked with the Bloodthirster’s and a surge of power coursed up his spine, suffusing his whole being with raw energy. In a jolt Vectrix suddenly felt like a passive observer, yanked from the controls, and detached from the actions of his body. It strode implacably forward, force-halberd held expertly in an assured low guard. The mouth sonorously intoned a catechism Vectrix had never heard, in a deep booming voice barely his own.

‘In nomine Imperator et spiritus hominis, semel oblatum. Ego mittam te.’

For the first time, since its bloody emergence into the Materium, the Greater Daemon paused. Hooves subtly shifted into a defensive stance and gnarled red hands gripped their weapons even tighter. Rage billowed off the Greater Daemon’s brazen skin in sheets of steam and its guttural roars subsided to a menacing frustrated growl; its final objective was now thwarted by this solid pillar of cold white light.

As the young Grey Knight’s nascent psychic powers finally started to manifest, his aegis struggled to fully regulate this totally unexpected surge of power. Electric blue sparks cascaded from his armour, dancing in pulses timed to every breath of ethereal mist drifting from his helmet’s visor vents. The smell of ozone saturated the air. Vectrix heard his voice continue the mantra, rising in power with every repetition, ‘In nomine Imperator et spiritus hominis, obtulit viginti duo. Ego mittam te! In nomine Imperator et spiritus hominis, obtulit viginti tres. Ego mittam te!’

The Greater Daemon’s burning desire to slaughter this impudently formidable opponent was starting to overwhelm its tenuous martial caution. But the vile creature had, is, and would always experience these anathemic servants of the Carrion Throne previously, now, and forever. This opponent can never be underestimated; either way the beast’s limited patience had ended. Even as the cold light before it intensified, with each purposeful approaching step, the immense Bloodthirster hunched into a predatory crouch. Every brawny muscle clenched, sinews straining to ready a lunging decapitating swing of its gargantuan blood slicked axe. However in the precise moment of the hellish creature’s pounce, that fatal flash of hesitation struck the Greater Daemon. It spotted that the Grey Knight had finally stopped advancing, his stance now squared towards it, and his glowing blue eyes boring straight into the Daemon’s very essence.

Vectrix felt a fresh ripple of power rising from the pit of his stomach. He saw his force-halberd draw an arc into the ground in front of him, with a graceful swipe. The momentum carried his hand to his hip, the force-halberd held perfectly horizontal behind his lower back. In the same fluid motion, his free hand rose before him towards the uncoiling Daemon. Index and middle fingers extended, thumb curled away from the hand, and his voice rose to the pinnacle of its mighty crescendo. It was a roar that transcended Vectrix’s body and rang from the air itself, drowning all other sound in a sea of righteous Holy authority. Each word rolled around the awestruck battlefield in thunderous waves, booming off the surrounding mountains. The transfixed Bloodthrister could only mouth obscene defiance, its once decisive stance reduced to bracing against the typhoon of energy.

‘In nomine Imperator et spiritus hominis. Ego mittam te! In nomine vota, sexagesimum sextum! Ego mittam te!’

A fiery blue aura engulfed Brother Vectrix, ‘MALAK-DA RUBIKHAN! EGO MITTAM TE!’

The ground, previously inscribed by Vectrix’s nemesis force-halberd, sundered with an echoing crack upon the final syllable and the apoplectic Greater Daemon imploded into a thundercloud of blood! Impossible dimensions fragmented the abomination’s evaporating body and crackles of bizarre black lightning arced into the gore soaked earth. The last things to disappear were the creature's baleful eyes, burning in its shocked deathmask. The hateful stare never leaving Vectrix, until they too dissolved into fleeting wisps of red mist. In the vacuum of stillness surrounding the stunned Grey Knight, the incandescent tsunami of power coursing through him began to recede. Vectrix lurched to the surface of his mind and into his body, pulled back from the abyssal blackness of his subconscious. He toppled forward onto his hands and knees in complete shock, the residual surges of psychic energy completely overwhelming his adrenal and nervous systems. His muscles spasmed, his vision was blurry and even his transhuman endocrine system failed to abate the symptoms. Fighting to calm rapid shallow breaths, a clear thought finally cut through his clouded mind. It was not a welcome moment of clarity. ‘ _ I need to remove my helmet. _ ’

He tried to will his juddering arms into engaging the mag-seals on his helmet, but they simply would not budge. His tortured diaphragm finally gave out and convulsed violently. From outside the prone Grey Knight’s armour, the surviving handful of Astra Militarum troopers, now assembled at a tentative distance from the angelic giant, heard a faint splat. Vectrix finally slumped over, grasping clumsily at the mag-seals, before frantically wrenching the disgusting container off. It tumbled away from him, spilling the bilious liquid over the floor. He retched and spluttered for breath, spitting acrid gouts of noxious goo, and vainly tried to wipe his face with a ceramite gauntlet. Biological safety protocols, implanted within his body, finally catalysed and the Astartes started to fall unconscious. Just before his bleary eyes drooped shut, Vectrix was sure he could almost make out a tiny robed figure, silhouetted in the blinding search lamps of the incoming Thunderhawk. He blinked reluctantly and caught a shadow of it, arm raised, before it vanished and blackness took him.


End file.
